It is a valid point that a charismatic leader who represents the "wave of the future" and does things like promise to take some of his customers to Mars can send a stock through the roof. That momentum is precisely why I have maintained my investment. But this isn't going to last. If/when the power network is built out and the market becomes more substantial, Tesla is going to have real competitors in the US, Germany, and Japan. Once they realize it is worth their time, they will start producing models that are adapted to that same power network. And they already have loyal customers to carry over into the electric car paradigm that will choose, say an electric BWM, over a Tesla. It's a very low barrier of entry.

When Tesla gets these real competitors, Tesla and the others aren't going to be compared based on how many customers they promise to send to Mars. They will be compared on "old school" analysis (as many of the Tesla fanboys seem to denigrate as "irrelevant" which reminds of Greenspan's infamous speech when he justified the lofty dot.com multiples in a similar fashion). Either Tesla will have to change their accounting or the other manufacturers will adjust theirs to the highly optimistic version that Tesla is using which will make them look to be a much greater value.

Another possible downside is that Tesla's accounting games will be counter-productive similar to start-up companies I work with who race to get the highest valuation possible only to find later they set a bar for themselves they can't possibly achieve, and even after actually growing the company well, they can still fail because they didn't hit the lofty goals they set.

I'll hang on to my Tesla for now but I can see changing that in next few years.

Those leveraged things don't work according to plan. They require significant human intervention and thus can actually sometimes move opposite where they are supposed to. Non-leveraged seems more stable.

QA aided wealthy people and banks who were able to unload bad investments that will now "mature" on the fed balance sheet. These privileged few, who get the backing of the fed to cover their mistakes, invested their fed printed winnings in the market and hence the bull run. Now that all historic safe savings vehicles have been destroyed, main street is starting to load into the stock market again. And just in time for the privileged to start taking their profits. I'm sure they'll be back to buy on the big dip. It's an easy game if you have the capital, are of the privileged class and have a central bank cover your losses.

I don't know. I definitely enjoy a gourmet burger but kids don't usually care. In addition, being a low carb person, in a pinch I can get a satisfying meal of 600 calories of protein and fat (toss the bun) at McDonalds for approx. $2.50. Any gourmet burger is probably going to set me back an average of $10. That's a huge difference. I can buy 4 meals at McDonalds for the same price as one at a "better burger" place, quality aside.

Also, you have already eaten "pink-slime", it is just lean beef trimmings removed from the bone added back to the ground beef. The ABC story, while not a conspiracy, was effectively a hit job. There have been no safety problems with "pink-slime" in the 20 years it has been used. The anti-meat people coined the term "pink-slime" to scare people off it. Their agenda is to scare you off meat, this was a small stepping stone. There's much scarier things in hot dogs and other forms of processed meats that nobody seems to care about as much.

It seems like a market overreaction to me. I don't like the prospect of tax increases but the possible increases seem modest. The spending cuts are not even cuts, they are decreases to intended spending increases. In other words, we will still spend more next year than this year! Our average borrow amount for the federal government is in the neighborhood of $1T per year with 43 cents of every dollar spent being borrowed, an incredible rate by any measure. The sooner we get some level of control over that the better, even if it means there will be some slowing of growth. Faster growth, that is supposed to be paid for by future generations, is not real growth. The bill will come due.

It will improve over time but the same can be said of any typical half-baked Android or Microsoft feature. That is the difference. The other players in the market are always ready to push something not quite finished out there to see what type of audience it garners, whether they should even put more work into it or not, and to try to play up the value believing that MORE features are better than fewer high quality features. The main reason for Apple's success is they don't do that (well now they do!), you get a high quality device and high quality service such that the most non-technical of people can easily use it and easily get help if they have a problem. It is alarming they took this path, it is a page right out of the Microsoft book.

What Steve Jobs had that was so unique was the strength to say "no". If it isn't perfection then don't sully the product with it. Most CEO's and executives, even those considered the best in industry, are challenged by that.